Dalton - Build your own!!!
The two upsides i've seen from a dedicated NAS are;
They have a nice aesthetic footprint with lockable drive draws.
They are very simple to deploy (theoretically), and scale. Enterprise ones are the only ones worth buying though. Ones that have XEON processors in the $4k+ range offer some serious features.
The only downside to building your own is that it takes longer. If it's for home, you definitely want to build you own.
QNAP's, SYNOLOGY, NetGear, Thecus, all of those home NAS' I equate to an overpriced laptop - with one exception - It takes much longer (if possible at all) to remove all the bundled crap software that you'll never use.
I have a TS-469PRO from QNAP. I bought it because i didn't have the *time* to build a NAS and configure it, and i stupidly thought these things were purpose built and dedicated to the purpose. In fact, it's hundreds and hundreds of dollars more than you need to pay for only a small fraction of the versatility.
If you built you own, you can run any operating system you like, and open source packages you like, and closed source software, you can take advantage of VT-X extensions and run 3 concurrent operating systems if you like. (Perhaps you could use OS-X for it's awesome AppleRAID performance and monitoring, Windows Server 2012 for an AD, and Linux for web servers, file sharing, database apps etc) - The thing is... it's YOUR choice, and you can change your mind and re-configure it however you like. You can put PCI host cards in it and remote control the thing with a simple script and an iPhone app, whatever..
I learned a major lesson in this. My QNAP sits here, after spending about 9 times more on it than i would have building my own for half the price.
And i'm not exaggerating on half the price;
$500 would get me a top line Intel server MB with RAC, Core i5 (with AES-NI hardware acceleration), high-end graphics card (these days some software utilises GPU power for certain tasks), and a Case with a SATA draw frame, keyboard, mouse, 550W power supply.
I spent $900 on my QNAP and it's little tiny Atom processor that belongs in a smartphone. It's a dual core atom 2700 - The CPU is at 26% just doing nothing except NFS sharing. all external apps and multimedia functions are disabled. It only supports EXT on it's internal drives (though different boxes would be different), it has no ability to utilise Truecrypt, Bitlocker, FileVault, etc, so my Mac's are doing 3/4 of the NAS's job at the moment. The embedded linux lacks almost every useful function (including "man"), and amongst other things i've had crashes, data corruption, random reboots, and just recently heard from technical support that it doesn't support the HFS+ file system. (it says it does, but they re-created some issues in their lab based on a problem i was having and they have told me i can't use HFS+ drives with it!) What about other things like Plex media server, iTunes sharing, etc.... Forget any NAS implementation of these, it will just drive you crazy. At least on your own server you can put on whatever you want.
Sky is the limit - but i sincerely hope i helped you, as i really wanted my experience to somehow help *someone* - I was deceived by the fact that they are so popular
Bottom line - Home NAS' have their place, maybe the $200-300 ones anyway, and so do enterprise NAS' - but if you have the time and expertise, you will thank yourself forever for building your own.
